I'm completely out of my comfort zone with this paper, because I'm more apt to engage appropriative/adaptive texts through Foucauldian lenses. I've been trying to branch out, but this one's tough:
For all that may be said about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), one thing is clear within popular culture: the homo faber archetype—of Creator and Creation—is a hyper-protean imaginative engine for adaptations and appropriations. Victor Frankenstein’s failure to anticipate his inability to control his Creation has become a hypo-narrative, or a source, for a myriad of hypertexts in multiple genres and across representational mediums. In “Facing the Ugly: The Case of Frankenstein,” Denise Gigante discusses how the Creation “takes on a life of his own, proliferating wildly and engendering an ever-increasing number of dramatic and cinematic adaptations, ‘hideous progeny’ of the original ‘hideous progeny’” (582). But, going further, Victor Frankenstein’s apocalyptic vision, should he create a female companion for the Creation, operates as a springboard for many dystopic Frankensteinian variants. Speaking to Sir Robert Walton, Victor proclaims,
As I sat, a train of reflection occurred to me, which led me to consider the effects of what I was now doing….Even if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. (190)
Thereafter, Victor destroys his work in progress, and he hears the Creation’s “howl of devilish despair and revenge” (191). Arguably, the Creation understands this act as the restriction of immersion in an essentially quotidian humanizing domestic space/place, and because he is denied this, the Creation maintains vigilance in restricting Victor from the domestic experience, contaminating the Frankensteins’ domestic space/place by killing his dear friend, Henry Clerval, and his fiancée, Elizabeth. I use the word “contamination” as a way to speak simultaneously to the Gothic motif of the noxious presence of the non-human within the Frankenstein household, and how Victor entertains humane notions of preventing the prosperity of a “race of devils.”
Denise Gigante extends Edmund Burke’s and Immanuel Kant’s discourses on the sublime and beautiful by discussing the aesthetics of the ugly within Frankenstein beyond the “via negative of aesthetic theory” (566), exploring the malignant psychosomatic symptoms characters experience when confronting the Creation, or “facing the ugly.” This essay demonstrates how the 28 Days Later franchise has appropriated the contaminating presence of Victor’s “ugly,” physically-inharmonious Creation and relocated it in the “Rage-infected” non-human, known as the “Infected.” Where Victor Frankenstein fears the potential of the Creation to populate the earth with horrifying non-people, thereby destabilizing any person’s desire to attain the domestic ideal, the 28 Days Later franchise actualizes this dystopic vision. My purpose in this essay is 1) to use an aesthetic approach to recover the franchise from its identification with Zombie Horror, locating its primary source in Frankenstein; and 2) to identify how, instead of a loss of female identification with and immersion in the domestic as depicted by Shelley, Michael Alan Nelson’s narrative entails the character Selena’s reclaiming of it. Her trials in Infected territory are a radical revision of female agency and empowerment within the Gothic tradition, which I argue evidences a political and ethical methodology of adapters to develop narratives synchronously with theoretical developments and criticism of the carceral spaces/places Gothic heroines traditionally inhabit. In voluntarily immersing herself in Infected territory as a guide for arbiters of the “truth” of Infection, Selena apotheosizes to the status of the sublime—something both the non-human and patrilineal human should fear. In other words, she “goes bump in the night.”
Within both Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006) and Julie Sanders’s Adaptation and Appropriation (2006), aesthetic theory remains in the backdrop when they discuss the complex processes of adaptation and appropriation. Attention is chiefly conferred on cultural, historical and ideological palimpsests on a source text to deduce how markers of originality evidence an adapter’s political commitment. For instance, Sanders writes, “[M]any theories which had their intellectual foundation in recent decades, such as feminism, postmodernism, structuralism, gay and lesbian studies or queer theory, and postcolonialism had a profound impact on the modes and methodologies of adapting” (46). Aesthetic theory remains a distinct and distinctly unexplored terrain in such discourse; however, Gigante’s aesthetic exploration of the ugly within Frankenstein provides a bridge of plenitude to discuss how this dimension is adapted with the 28 Days Later franchise. There is a structural and an aesthetic intimacy between the two texts, and this intimacy becomes a point where we can discuss how the 28 Days Later franchise is Frankensteinian, not mere Zombie Horror.
Gigante begins, “Whatever else can—and has—been said about Victor Frankenstein’s monster, one thing cannot be denied: the creature is exceedingly ugly. But in what does this ugliness consist?” (565). Instead of descanting on Edmund Burke’s notion of the pleasurably-terrifying sublime, she discusses the Creation in terms of being a manifestation of the Lacanian real. The Creation’s physical bodily excess—his size and the way Victor describes his skin’s near inadequacy to contain his body—represents a deeply repressive containment of the real that is about to “burst on the scene” (567). Gigante goes on to describe how confronting the real immediately stifles imaginative thought processes that produce and sustain notions of the pleasurable and beautiful. Ugliness, then, becomes an active contagion that pathologically displeases and disillusions the symbolic order and maintenance of categories of knowledge that seek to sustain illusions of the pleasurable and beautiful. In this way, Victor seeks to regulate multiple manifestations of the pathologically displeasing in the act of denying the Creation a mate; he fears apocalyptic destruction of the entire symbolic order of human domesticity should they procreate. This fear becomes the appropriative entity and entry point into the dystopian world within the 28 Days Later franchise, for genetic engineering may be understood as the displacement of Victor’s—the artist-scientist’s—“unhallowed arts” (qtd. in Gigante 566).
For all that may be said about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), one thing is clear within popular culture: the homo faber archetype—of Creator and Creation—is a hyper-protean imaginative engine for adaptations and appropriations. Victor Frankenstein’s failure to anticipate his inability to control his Creation has become a hypo-narrative, or a source, for a myriad of hypertexts in multiple genres and across representational mediums. In “Facing the Ugly: The Case of Frankenstein,” Denise Gigante discusses how the Creation “takes on a life of his own, proliferating wildly and engendering an ever-increasing number of dramatic and cinematic adaptations, ‘hideous progeny’ of the original ‘hideous progeny’” (582). But, going further, Victor Frankenstein’s apocalyptic vision, should he create a female companion for the Creation, operates as a springboard for many dystopic Frankensteinian variants. Speaking to Sir Robert Walton, Victor proclaims,
As I sat, a train of reflection occurred to me, which led me to consider the effects of what I was now doing….Even if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. (190)
Thereafter, Victor destroys his work in progress, and he hears the Creation’s “howl of devilish despair and revenge” (191). Arguably, the Creation understands this act as the restriction of immersion in an essentially quotidian humanizing domestic space/place, and because he is denied this, the Creation maintains vigilance in restricting Victor from the domestic experience, contaminating the Frankensteins’ domestic space/place by killing his dear friend, Henry Clerval, and his fiancée, Elizabeth. I use the word “contamination” as a way to speak simultaneously to the Gothic motif of the noxious presence of the non-human within the Frankenstein household, and how Victor entertains humane notions of preventing the prosperity of a “race of devils.”
Denise Gigante extends Edmund Burke’s and Immanuel Kant’s discourses on the sublime and beautiful by discussing the aesthetics of the ugly within Frankenstein beyond the “via negative of aesthetic theory” (566), exploring the malignant psychosomatic symptoms characters experience when confronting the Creation, or “facing the ugly.” This essay demonstrates how the 28 Days Later franchise has appropriated the contaminating presence of Victor’s “ugly,” physically-inharmonious Creation and relocated it in the “Rage-infected” non-human, known as the “Infected.” Where Victor Frankenstein fears the potential of the Creation to populate the earth with horrifying non-people, thereby destabilizing any person’s desire to attain the domestic ideal, the 28 Days Later franchise actualizes this dystopic vision. My purpose in this essay is 1) to use an aesthetic approach to recover the franchise from its identification with Zombie Horror, locating its primary source in Frankenstein; and 2) to identify how, instead of a loss of female identification with and immersion in the domestic as depicted by Shelley, Michael Alan Nelson’s narrative entails the character Selena’s reclaiming of it. Her trials in Infected territory are a radical revision of female agency and empowerment within the Gothic tradition, which I argue evidences a political and ethical methodology of adapters to develop narratives synchronously with theoretical developments and criticism of the carceral spaces/places Gothic heroines traditionally inhabit. In voluntarily immersing herself in Infected territory as a guide for arbiters of the “truth” of Infection, Selena apotheosizes to the status of the sublime—something both the non-human and patrilineal human should fear. In other words, she “goes bump in the night.”
Within both Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006) and Julie Sanders’s Adaptation and Appropriation (2006), aesthetic theory remains in the backdrop when they discuss the complex processes of adaptation and appropriation. Attention is chiefly conferred on cultural, historical and ideological palimpsests on a source text to deduce how markers of originality evidence an adapter’s political commitment. For instance, Sanders writes, “[M]any theories which had their intellectual foundation in recent decades, such as feminism, postmodernism, structuralism, gay and lesbian studies or queer theory, and postcolonialism had a profound impact on the modes and methodologies of adapting” (46). Aesthetic theory remains a distinct and distinctly unexplored terrain in such discourse; however, Gigante’s aesthetic exploration of the ugly within Frankenstein provides a bridge of plenitude to discuss how this dimension is adapted with the 28 Days Later franchise. There is a structural and an aesthetic intimacy between the two texts, and this intimacy becomes a point where we can discuss how the 28 Days Later franchise is Frankensteinian, not mere Zombie Horror.
Gigante begins, “Whatever else can—and has—been said about Victor Frankenstein’s monster, one thing cannot be denied: the creature is exceedingly ugly. But in what does this ugliness consist?” (565). Instead of descanting on Edmund Burke’s notion of the pleasurably-terrifying sublime, she discusses the Creation in terms of being a manifestation of the Lacanian real. The Creation’s physical bodily excess—his size and the way Victor describes his skin’s near inadequacy to contain his body—represents a deeply repressive containment of the real that is about to “burst on the scene” (567). Gigante goes on to describe how confronting the real immediately stifles imaginative thought processes that produce and sustain notions of the pleasurable and beautiful. Ugliness, then, becomes an active contagion that pathologically displeases and disillusions the symbolic order and maintenance of categories of knowledge that seek to sustain illusions of the pleasurable and beautiful. In this way, Victor seeks to regulate multiple manifestations of the pathologically displeasing in the act of denying the Creation a mate; he fears apocalyptic destruction of the entire symbolic order of human domesticity should they procreate. This fear becomes the appropriative entity and entry point into the dystopian world within the 28 Days Later franchise, for genetic engineering may be understood as the displacement of Victor’s—the artist-scientist’s—“unhallowed arts” (qtd. in Gigante 566).